With respect to the exterior of your home, the quality of paint that you choose is most definitely important. Paint is exposed to all the elements, including sun, rain, snow, and ice. Higher quality paints are simply engineered to hold up longer and increase the life cycle of your paint. Premium paints last 25 to 50 percent longer than their less expensive counterparts. This saves you, the homeowner, money because you will not have to repaint your home as often. For interior paints, quality is important, but it’s more about coverage and durability, and how easy it will be to keep clean. When it comes to painting the outside of your building, however, we’d like to caution you against making price your first consideration, particularly if you are hiring your paint job out to qualified professionals like us at Custom Coatings. According to field tests done by the Paint Quality Institute, ordinary exterior paint lasts about four years, while top quality 100 percent acrylic latex paint can last ten years or more when an experienced professional prepares the surface correctly before applying the paint. Let’s look at this in terms of simple math. If the ordinary paint lasts four years and the total cost to paint your house is $3,000, you would spend at least $6,000 to paint your house at least twice in ten years. If you chose to go with the top quality paint and that increased the total cost of the job to $4,000, you would save at least $2,000 over the life of that paint job because it will last over twice as long (ten years versus four). We’ve all heard the old cliché that you get what you pay for, and it is true that there are a lot of situations where we can save a few dollars and still be quite happy with what we ended up with for our investment. When we start talking about the various grades of exterior paint, however, over two decades of experience has taught us that this cliché most definitely has merit.
